Breathing new life into 'old' eggs

EGGS donated by young women could be used to repair the damaged eggs of older women, increasing the chances of successful fertilisation.

IVF often fails in older women and one reason is thought to be abnormalities in the cytoplasm of their eggs. Injecting the nucleus of one egg into an "enucleated" egg, was recently explored as a means of bypassing rare, inheritable diseases caused by faulty mitochondria, which are found in the cytoplasm.

Now Atsushi Tanaka of St Mother Hospital in Kitakyushu, Japan, and colleagues are using nuclear transfer to breathe new life into old eggs. His team removed the nuclei from 31 eggs collected from women undergoing IVF and injected them into enucleated eggs donated by women aged under 35. Of these, 25 eggs looked viable. When injected with sperm, 7 eggs or 28 per cent formed early-stage embryos called blastocyts, compared with just 3 per cent of ...

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